Increase flexibility and enable a cyber-resilient IT infrastructure

Broadcom and Google Cloud’s continued commitment to solving our customers’ most pressing challenges stems from our joint goal to enable every organization’s ability to digitally transform through data-powered innovation with the highly secure and cyber-resilient infrastructure, platform, industry solutions and expertise. With our longstanding technology and go-to-market partnership, we are yet again innovating to deliver value in the space of cyber and disaster recovery.

Cyber resilience has become a top-of-mind priority for our customers, as the data shows that it presents a challenge most today are ill-equipped to address. For example, 59% of organizations were hit by ransomware in 2023 and 70% of them suffered data encryption.¹

Enabling true cyber resilience requires a layered approach that spans across infrastructure hardening, strong distributed lateral security and confident cyber recovery—all of which are uniquely enabled by the VMware Cloud Foundation platform.

An area where most organizations struggle today is their ability to restore operations after a cyber event. It presents unique challenges, including the need to select recovery point candidates, validate them in a secure environment before restore, set up this environment, and prevent reinfection. To achieve this, the vast majority of organizations report having to use up to five solutions across each of the following categories to enable cyber recovery: backup, cloud infrastructure, networking, disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS), and extended detection and response.²

The inevitable outcomes are that they are vulnerable to attacks due to a scattered approach to cyber resilience, and their confidence in recovery remains low even after they’ve been hit and have implemented remediation measures.

VMware Live Recovery was engineered to solve these challenges. It delivers cyber and disaster recovery for VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure under a unified management experience. It enables confident, secure cyber recovery through a dedicated, step-by-step workflow that integrates guided restore point selection, safe validation of recovery points in an isolated recovery environment (IRE) with live behavioral analysis, network isolation to prevent reinfection, and recovery orchestration at enterprise scale.

Broadcom’s mission is to enable customers to recover from anything, anywhere, and we are delivering on this promise. At Explore Las Vegas last year, we announced that customers will be able to leverage an on-premises IRE for cyber recovery, which brings significant benefits to organizations that need to preserve data sovereignty or that have to abide by strict privacy and locality requirements.

In addition, we have announced plans to enhance VMware Live Recovery support for Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) as a cyber and disaster recovery (DR) site, for both on-premises and GCVE environments. This builds on VMware Live Recovery’s existing protection of GCVE sites as a source and enables a consistent deployment topology for on-premises and cloud environments for their cyber resilience and DR needs.

“VMware Live Recovery support for Google Cloud empowers customers with more choices for their cyber and disaster recovery strategies,” said Manoj Sharma, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud. “This solution will enable just-in-time recovery by leveraging the elasticity of Google Cloud and delivers protection against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. This is a testament to our deep engineering commitment to solving complex customer challenges and lays a foundation for more innovation to come.“
VMware Live Recovery on GCVE enables customers to benefit from a consistent VMware experience, with the elasticity and scalability of the cloud. GCVE supports the full VMware Cloud Foundation platform on enterprise-grade infrastructure, with unique capabilities such as:

• Four 9s of uptime service level agreement in a single zone
• Flexible node families with eight node shapes for better capacity shaping
• 100 Gbps of east-west networking
• Native virtual private cloud integration

Combined with the power of VMware Cloud Foundation, the service enables customers to deploy flexible technology infrastructure that helps them innovate faster and work better together.

These innovations offer important choices for customers to solve their modern cyber and disaster recovery needs in the face of an ever-changing threat landscape. Together, VMware/Broadcom and Google continue to design, develop, and deliver cutting-edge technology to solve our customers’ most pressing problems.

¹Sophos State of Ransomware 2024
²Forrester Opportunity Snapshot: Organizations Are Missing Critical Ransomware Recovery Capabilities, July 2024

About the author:
Belu de Arbelaiz is the Sr. Product Line Marketing Manager for VMware’s Data Protection as a Service portfolio, in charge of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.